Category: Featured

Since 2016, more than 73,000 people across Europe have explored new career opportunities with the Google Developer scholarship; 21% have already landed new jobs in tech.

Since Google and Udacity first launched the groundbreaking Grow with Google scholarship in late 2016, an astounding 73,000 scholars from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa have learned new cutting-edge skills in a range of Udacity’s programs. It’s an incredible figure that provides a real insight into the positive gains Google and Udacity’s initiative is making to address the digital skills gap in Europe. Most importantly, it has supported many individuals to learn new skills, grow their careers, and change their lives. This is a part of Google’s programme called Grow with Google, a series of training, tools and events to equip people with the skills they need to succeed in the digital economy.

With January 2019 officially in the history books, many of us are likely contemplating the New Year’s resolutions we made just a few weeks ago. Whether you aimed to go to the gym seven days a week, get your finances in order, or limit your social media use, there’s a strong statistical likelihood that your earnestly-made resolutions are already looking a little…frayed.

But help is here! When it comes to keeping people focused on building their skills, maintaining focus, and seeing things through to completion, we’d humbly suggest we know a couple things. So here are our tips for creating learning resolutions you’ll actually keep.

Be clear on your goals

It’s a great instinct to want to be audacious and learn something new. Setting yourself a challenging goal and achieving it is what Udacity is all about. But it’s important to frame ambitious goals properly—you need to think about your motivation to achieve the goal, and you should be clear on the steps you must take to reach it.

Bruno Santos recently landed a graduate role as an Autonomous Engineer after enrolling in the Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program. He was able to move from Portugal to the UK to take up the role, and loves the work he does everyday. It is the happy conclusion to a career journey in which Bruno pursued physics, then data science, before deciding neither field was what he truly wanted to do. It was only when he found robotics that he knew he’d found a subject he felt really passionate about—one where he could go beyond theory to build real projects.

We spoke with Bruno to hear how he took what he learned in his Nanodegree program and turned it into his new career.

The inspiration to learn new tech skills can come from many places. For Dunya Oguz, it came when she started her first job after college. Dunya moved from Turkey to study economics at McGill University in Canada. When she graduated, she landed a marketing role at a fast-paced startup and quickly got inspired by the tech savviness of her colleagues. Soon, Dunya was exploring how she could build her own skill set, particularly in data analytics and SQL. That’s when she found Udacity and enrolled in the Data Analyst Nanodegree program. Within a matter of months, she realized she’d found a subject she felt really passionate about, and started applying to roles in data analysis. She started getting responses—even before she’d graduated the program!

Now, Dunya works as a data analyst for a Canadian startup that builds mobile free-to-play games. She’s super excited about her work, and sees opportunities to grow her career in a thousand different directions. This is Dunya’s story.

We recently opened enrollments for the new class of Udacity’s Robotics Software Engineer Nanodegree program. In it, you’ll focus on building a portfolio of five hands-on projects using ROS and C++ (the most important programming language in robotics) and you’ll learn core robotics algorithms.

As we prepare to get started in a few weeks time, we thought it would be useful to speak with someone who already works in robotics to get an insider view on the robotics sector. We recently caught up with Michael Costa, a robotics engineer who has a passion for working with medical devices.

He gave us a great insight into his career journey and some great advice on how someone new to robotics can land their first position.

Make 2019 the year you set yourself a new career goal, learn new skills, and change your life. To give you some ideas on where you should focus your efforts, we’ve profiled some of the hottest tech careers you should consider right now.

Blockchain Developer

LinkedIn’s recent 2018 US Emerging Jobs Report profiled the jobs and skills growing most rapidly across the US. All of the jobs on the list have been experiencing tremendous growth, but one role still managed to stand out—Blockchain Developer. Driven by the surging interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the number of people who added “Blockchain Developer” to their LinkedIn profile experienced 33x growth between just 2014 and 2018!

We’re already into the second week of 2019 and want to share another story of how our students have built new skills, landed new jobs, and totally changed their lives. So let us introduce you to Richa Maheshwari.

Last year was a great year for Richa. She began married life, she moved from India to Malaysia, and she made a major career move—from journalism to working with data—after studying with Udacity! We recently got the opportunity to chat with her to learn how she changed the direction of her life so successfully in just twelve months.